


Survivors

by ncfan



Category: Naruto
Genre: (sort of), Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Empathy, First Meetings, Gen, Gore, Loss, Sympathy, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 12:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7222585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The girl had eyes like his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survivors

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to do a fic about what, according to the databooks, is the canonical way Karin and Sasuke met (After the Chunin Exams, anyways). I usually go with a specific AU for how Karin ended up working for Orochimaru, since I’m fairly attached to that AU and I don’t like the fact that this encounter and Karin’s ‘origin story’ was entirely relegated to supplemental material when, with the other non-Sasuke members of Taka, we at least get _references_ to how they wound up with Orochimaru in the manga proper. However, I do like the idea of the canonical ‘first’ meeting between Sasuke and Karin, because it encapsulates a large reason as to why I ship SasuKarin: the empathy.

Orochimaru felt the need to drag Sasuke out into the wilds with him when he made trips into Oto no Kuni and the other small lands of the north where Orochimaru had bases, hideouts and safe houses. Sasuke could, with some difficulty persuade himself that there was a point of this—it would be good for him to get the lay of the land, and if, when the time came for him to kill Itachi, the latter chose to hide in Oto or Kusa or Taki or the no-man’s-land in between the former two, it would go better if Sasuke knew the terrain and any places his brother might take shelter. Sasuke wasn’t going to let his plan fall to pieces because he couldn’t find the country his brother was hiding in on a map.

However, Orochimaru didn’t view these trips in the same light as Sasuke. To Orochimaru, it was far less about surveying and cataloguing their surroundings, or even ensuring that enemy nin weren’t poking around where they weren’t supposed to be, than it was about scoping out potential recruits, or gawking at Orochimaru’s favorite ‘points of interest’—namely, disaster areas.

This time, it was a village in Kusa no Kuni that was reputed to have been destroyed very recently. Sasuke almost refused to go. He took no pleasure from wading through the wreck of people’s lives, and anyways, he needed to train. His time would be a lot better spent trying to better control the Cursed Seal.

But this would be the first time he had seen daylight in over a month, and Sasuke didn’t know when he’d get the chance to feel fresh air again. So he went.

-0-0-0-

Sasuke fought not to wince as another blast of icy wind hit his face. Winters were miserably cold this far north, colder than anything Sasuke had ever contended with in Konohagakure. Konoha in winter was… wet. Actually, Konoha was wet most of the year, but in winter in particular it experienced plenty of rain and plenty of frost, but little to no snow. The last time Sasuke had seen snow, he was four years old. He’d asked his mother where it came from, and she said…

She said…

He couldn’t remember what she had said.

A month ago, Sasuke had emerged from an Oto hideout (the hideout in question wasn’t equipped for winter—though the one they’d moved to wasn’t what anyone would call ‘toasty’) to find the ground blanketed in snow six inches deep. He’d soon learned the advantages of thick boots, as well as a new skill: how to walk on top of snow without snowshoes, and without sinking in. He’d thought it bad enough. Northwestern Kusa was even worse; Sasuke spotted some twigs sticking out of the snow that he suspected were actually the tops of bushes. You’d have thought the far north of the continent was entering a new Ice Age.

Of course, Orochimaru didn’t seem to feel the cold at all. He stepped fluidly over the snow, clad only in the same thin kimono he always wore when he wasn’t working undercover or expecting a fight, and didn’t even shiver. Sasuke pulled his cloak closer about him and scowled. He had found a fire jutsu in Orochimaru’s scrolls that enabled the user to stay warm in cold weather without a cloak or a coat. Sasuke had passed over it at the time, deeming it useless to his goals, but he was starting to rethink that now.

“Hey,” Sasuke called out, an edge sharp as Kumo steel to his voice. “How much further to this village of yours?”

“Patience, Sasuke-kun, patience,” Orochimaru told him with a dry rattle of a laugh. “How do you hope to become strong if even the cold bothers you so?”

Sasuke thought of a retort, but bit back on it. As much as it galled him to admit it, Orochimaru was right. Itachi would exploit any misstep born of impatience without mercy. He had before.

After a little over a mile further, Sasuke caught a whiff of smoke in the air. It wasn’t a cook fire (he couldn’t smell meat or rice cooking with it), and Sasuke didn’t pick up the slightly sweet scent of the aromatic wood the people in this part of the shinobi world burned to stay warm. The smoke was acrid, stinging his mouth and nostrils. Sasuke set his jaw. They must be getting close.

Soon enough, Sasuke came to the top of a steep hill dotted with boulders and scraggly pines, overlooking a small valley below. A gust of wind carried smoke and ash to them from the valley’s surface, and Sasuke’s breath caught in his throat. Orochimaru’s contact hadn’t been exaggerating about the shape the village was in.

The buildings had been reduced to charred skeletons, whose blackened fingers reached futilely at the gray sky. Even from the crest of the hill, Sasuke could pick out the corpses of the slain, some as charred as their houses, others left intact, the greens and blues and yellows of their clothing the only splashes of color in this black and white wasteland. All was deathly still. Nothing stirred in the village, except for a soot-stained white blanket near the foot of the hill, fixed to a clothesline and flapping in the wind.

“Who did this?” Sasuke heard himself ask, his voice coming to his ears as though from far away.

Orochimaru’s mouth split in a sharp-toothed smile. “Who knows? Common raiders, or shinobi from Taki or from Tsuchi, perhaps, but it does not matter, either way. The result is inevitable, and it is the same reason you came to me. It is the nature of the strong to step on those weaker than them, and the nature of the weak to scurry away, or be stepped on. And it looks like the fools here did not scurry fast enough. But that is the way of the world.”

Sasuke clenched his hands into fists. So he had been learning.

(This was not the first time he had been confronted with such a sight.)

While Orochimaru looked for salvageable scrolls in the remains of the government buildings and archives, Sasuke wandered the silent streets, taking in the wreck of the people’s lives. There were corpses everywhere he looked, young and old alike, but the mere sight of corpses did not make him vomit or cry as it might have when he was small. The cold masked the scent of death, sealed decay beneath the surface of blue or blackened skin. Even when Sasuke practically tripped over a corpse, he caught only the faintest smell of rot. Their faces were slack in death, those whose faces were still intact, and more than one pair of sightless eyes stared at Sasuke from the ground as he passed them by.

He could see inside the houses easily, could see more corpses, could see ruined chairs and tables and beds, shards of stoneware pottery painted in the preferred style of the region—white background with interlocking green and yellow loops—blankets with burnt, curled-up edges, dolls with leather hair, kunai and shuriken embedded in signposts, a single shoe sitting out on someone’s doorway. The wreckage of people’s lives.

Such a sight would not have been incredible to Sasuke even before he left Konoha, though he suspected it would have made Naruto gape, or Sakura burst into tears. What did strike Sasuke as incredible was the fact that this wasn’t even the first time he had seen something like this since he left Konoha. Two villages now had he seen burned to the ground, despite the fact that, as far as Sasuke knew, none of the shinobi lands were currently at war with one another.

Orochimaru was a liar, but he wasn’t stupid, so Sasuke supposed he was right when he implied that there was no real strategical reason for the attack. More likely, someone in this village did something someone from a tougher village didn’t like, or this village was collateral damage in a larger conflict Sasuke didn’t know about—he had been told that when the mountain clans feuded with one another, they sometimes attacked villages their rivals traded with. Or, maybe, it was just to test their ability…

Sasuke came upon a building that he realized with a jolt must have been the village’s Shinobi Academy. It had not escaped the burning, and had been otherwise vandalized—a massive bronze-colored bell sat out in the snow—but enough of the building had survived for Sasuke to see that the façade was almost identical to the Academy in Konoha. He could see through a hole in the wall rows of small desks lined up to face a chalkboard—the desks might be burnt, their metal chairs half-melted, and the chalkboard lying in pieces on the floor, but Sasuke could pick it out as a classroom right away. He half-expected Iruka-sensei to come striding through the door with a textbook tucked under his arm, tell everyone to get their homework out, and then fall into an obvious trap Naruto had left waiting and start shouting.

(He hadn’t thought he’d miss that when he left. No one could be more surprised than Sasuke when he did.)

Mindless of the danger inherent in walking inside a burned building, Sasuke found a door that had been half-ripped off of its hinges, and slipped inside.

The building was empty of corpses, which relieved Sasuke for reasons he wasn’t willing to contemplate. Instead the floors were littered with broken glass from the internal windows and pages ripped out of textbooks, though Sasuke could only tell from the diagrams—they weren’t written in Common, like Konoha’s textbooks were.

The walls were scorched in places, but didn’t look nearly as badly burned as some of the other buildings in the village; in fact, parts of it were so untouched by the fire that the mess on the floor seemed more like the mess made by a group of students trying to evade their teachers while skipping class. With each footstep of his own crunching against glass, Sasuke expected to hear another. When his breath put fog on what glass was still sitting in the internal windows, he half-expected to see a hand reach past him to wipe away the fog and wave to a friend outside.

Sasuke felt as though the building could spring back to life at any moment. But then, he would spot a scorch mark on the wall, and tell himself to stop daydreaming.

Suddenly, there came a shuffling noise from behind a closed door. Sasuke leapt away from it, heart pounding, scanning the door for any sign of paper bombs. He saw none, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any on the other side of the door. Sasuke wound some string around the doorknob and backed away to the other side of the hall. His Sharingan whirled into life.

He yanked the door open with the wire. A quick look at the other side of the door revealed that there weren’t any paper bombs there, either. Neither could he sense a living presence inside the room—no chakra. But Sasuke still heard the shuffling noise. Frowning, he flicked a kunai out of his pouch, and crept inside.

This was not a classroom. It was far too small, and there was but one large desk, with a few chairs around it, three bookcases filled to bursting with books, a standing wardrobe, and thick green curtains over a window that blocked out nearly all of the gray light outside, so that the room was blanketed with a dense gloom. A teacher’s office, maybe?

Sasuke scanned the room, eyes narrowed, but he saw nothing more, and saw no hint of a chakra signature anywhere. He frowned, bewildered. It seemed as though the room really was empty, but he _knew_ he wasn’t hearing things; that sound _had_ come from in here.

Well, that Orochimaru hadn’t turned up yet—he always knew where Sasuke was; probably had something to do with the Cursed Seal—meant that he wasn’t done looking for scrolls. Anyways, if one of the attackers was still here, Orochimaru might not approve of Sasuke killing them, but Sasuke didn’t care about that. So long as Orochimaru didn’t try to stop him, he didn’t care. It wasn’t like Sasuke wanted to give Orochimaru new subjects for his and Kabuto’s twisted little science experiments, anyways.

Beneath the desk was clear. So were the wall and the window behind the curtains. There was just the standing wardrobe on the wall opposite from the desk left to search. Its double-doors were shut.

Sasuke flung the doors open without ceremony. “Ah! Get away from me!” a shrill voice cried. A pale hand emerged from the coats hung up in the wardrobe, clutching a kunai and shaking slightly.

Sasuke evaded the kunai with ease and roughly grabbed the owner’s wrist, squeezing until they gave a yelp of pain and the kunai clattered to the floor. “Come out of there, now!” he demanded in a hard voice. If this was one of the people who had burned the village and killed the people living in it, they were putting up a pretty poor showing now.

A pair of boots and several cans fell out of the wardrobe as the person inside struggled their way out past the coats. A girl about Sasuke’s age with a mop of shoulder-length red hair, glasses and dun-colored clothing emerged from the wardrobe. “Let go of me, you bastard!” she snapped, her voice shaking and her quivering lips curling in a snarl. “You think I can’t…”

She turned her strained, wan face to look at him. At about the same time Sasuke spotted the Kusa hitai-ate on her forehead, recognition dawned in the girl’s ruby-red eyes. “It’s you,” she said blankly, her face slackening.

Sasuke’s grip on her wrist relaxed, and eventually, he let go. He deactivated his Sharingan at about the same time. This… She wasn’t one of the attackers. She was a survivor. The only one, probably.

Moreover, she did look a bit familiar, even if they were from different villages. “We… met at the Chunin Exam, didn’t we?” he asked lamely.

She nodded choppily. “Yeah.” Her voice had gone dull. “I was the idiot who got jumped by a giant bear.”

“Oh.” So she was the girl from the Forest of Death, the one whose teammates had ditched her when she was in trouble—no honor among Kusa nin, Sasuke guessed. It looked like she had been separated from her teammates again.

“So…” She straightened, jutting her chin out, but the effect was ruined by her visibly shaking hands. “…What are Leaf nin doing here?”

It was an empty challenge, and they both knew it. The difference in power between them had already been amply demonstrated in the Forest of Death, and Kusa was a vassal state to Hi; the latter could operate here with impunity. But still, Sasuke put his kunai away and said flatly, “Leaf nin _aren’t_ here. I’m with someone else now. We’re just passing through.”

The look she turned on him was one of curiosity, but in possession of no real rancor. It looked like not everybody had the same opinion of missing nin as the five major nations. But at the same time, the girl said nothing. She just stared at the ground, dull-eyed, shivering in the cold even with her coat buttoned up to her neck.

The hairs on the back of Sasuke’s next stood up, for reasons that he suspected had nothing to do with the cold. “What happened here?” he asked her, trying to distract himself from the emotions welling up in his chest—though he supposed, too late, that hearing the tale of how the village was destroyed wouldn’t distract him at all.

At that, the girl’s head snapped up, her face taut. “I…” She struggled for a moment, then, scowling, muttered, “You really wanna know?”

He didn’t. “Yes,” Sasuke said quietly. “I do.”

She snorted. “You’re a liar, but I’ll tell you anyways.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath, her throat fluttering like a banner flapping in high wind. “It was…” All the fire went out of her voice. “…It was yesterday. Or the day before. I’m not sure; I’ve been hiding here since it ended.

“Enemy shinobi came to our village. I don’t know where they were from. They bore no sigil, I didn’t recognize their accents, and their chakra felt… mixed,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “I don’t know why they came here. They didn’t try to negotiate, they didn’t say what they wanted, they just…” The girl broke off, swallowing hard, her eyes over-bright and her fists clenched.

Sasuke nodded, his blood pounding painfully in his veins. “I get it.”

“I tried to warn them!” she burst out, her voice cracking. “I tried!” Her red hair fell over her face as she started to shake. “I told them I could sense people coming, but they wouldn’t…” She scrubbed furiously at her eyes, turning away from Sasuke. “…They never listen.”

It was a long time before she spoke again. Sasuke stared at the top of her bowed head in silence, as the wind battered on the roof, so loud that he could easily have believed that the enemy had returned and were charging down the rooftops even now. “I… I don’t understand why this happened!” she cried, her voice thick, teeth gritted. “Why did it happen?! What did we do?!” She started to cry, harsh, choking sobs that she tried to clamp her mouth down on before the second had even passed her lips.

“It sounds like they were just thugs,” Sasuke said bluntly. He couldn’t quite look at her face, and found he couldn’t look at her shaking hands. He stared at the ground, imagining wooden floorboards sprinkled with blood, rather than the stone floors of the Kusa Academy. “They probably didn’t have a reason.”

She let out a shaky, bitter laugh. “So they all died over nothing.”

“………Probably.”

The girl’s eyes, her sclera just as red as her irides, welled up again with thick tears. Her mouth made a poor facsimile of a smile. “That’s just _perfect_ ,” she choked out.

Not knowing what else to do, Sasuke unclipped his canteen from his belt and held it out to her. Judging from the sounds it made, the water was probably half-frozen, but he couldn’t just stand there and do nothing while she tallied up the dead in her mind.

When she looked up and saw the proffered canteen, the girl’s bloodshot eyes widened behind her tear-streaked glasses. She took the canteen out of Sasuke’s hands and put it up to her lips, taking a few deep gulps. Sasuke could hear ice bumping against the walls of the canteen, but she made no mention of that. “Thanks,” the girl hiccupped when she handed the canteen back to him, looking away. “I emptied out my canteen this morning. I’ve read that sometimes shinobi poison the wells when they make attacks like this, so the survivors can’t stay and rebuild. I… was never taught how to test for poison,” she admitted reluctantly, hunching her shoulders.

Sasuke wasn’t really looking to discuss differences in the quality of the education received in Kusa versus Hi. “You said you could sense them coming?” he prompted, curious in spite of himself. The only other genin he’d met who had sensor capabilities like that were the two Hyuuga, Hinata and Neji, and they had the Byakugan to aid them. Unless there were kekkei genkai in Kusa Sasuke didn’t know about (and considering who he was living with now, he was pretty sure he’d have heard _something_ about it by now), this girl didn’t have anything like that to fall back on.

She nodded, drawing herself up. “I’ve always been a natural for sensory jutsus,” she told him, a flicker of pride igniting in her raw voice. “I used to practice the jutsus in the scrolls in the Archives—the ones genin could get to, anyways. I knew the people coming were stronger than anyone here, so when I couldn’t get anyone to listen to me, I found a place to hide and concealed my chakra, too.” Her shoulders sagged, but at the same time, her eyes flashed. “You must think I’m a big coward.”

“Not really.” He had run from Itachi, that night. If she was a coward, she was no worse than him.

“Hmph.” She didn’t look convinced, but all the same, she didn’t contradict him.

Sasuke narrowed his eyes. “So what will you do now?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know. I can’t go to Kusagakure; they don’t take refugees, and they’d probably kill me on the spot if I told them I’d run and hid instead of defending the village.”

Was Konoha the same way? Sasuke knew they’d kill or imprison anyone who they even thought had betrayed them—he had no illusions about what would be waiting for him if he ever returned to Konoha, even if he did so _after_ killing their most notorious missing nin—but when he tried to remember if they had ever admitted refugees from the various border wars that had ignited and guttered out over the years, he didn’t think they had. Konoha boasted of its wealth, its prosperity, its great _generosity_ , but Sasuke did not think he had ever seen them open their gates to the desperate displaced.

“Do you have any family that would take you in?” Sasuke asked her, brow furrowed, trying not to dwell too much on the idea that if she had been raised in Hi, Konoha might not have taken her in.

She shook her head. “No,” she said quietly, “I don’t. It was just my mother, and she—“ What little color there was in the girl’s face suddenly drained from it, as though someone had stuck her with a kunai. “They burned my mother’s grave,” she whispered in a strangled voice. The girl made her way to the nearest chair; she kicked the teacher’s desk so hard that the little picture frames sitting out on top of it rattled, and collapsed in the chair, winding her hair in her fingers.

So she couldn’t go to Kusagakure, and she didn’t have any family that would care for her, now that her home was gone. Which meant that this girl’s options were to either make for another village in Kusa, which given the weather and her apparent level of survival training would likely end in her death, or to stay here. Here, in the ruins of her home, where even if she didn’t quickly starve, she would be surrounded always by the reminder of what she had lost.

“You can come with me.”

The girl looked up at him, disentangling her fingers from her hair. Her eyes were wet again, fresh tear tracks glittering on her blotchy cheeks and the scarlet tip of her nose. “What?” she asked blankly, as though she hadn’t understood. Maybe she hadn’t.

“You can come with me,” Sasuke repeated, frowning slightly.

“You’re not with Konoha anymore.” It wasn’t a question. “So who are you with?” the girl probed, peering up at Sasuke with her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed.

Sasuke saw no point in not telling her. She deserved to know who’d she be dealing with if she said ‘yes.’ “Orochimaru.”

She recoiled. “ _Him?_ Why’d you go off with _him_?!” she demanded, her voice practically dripping with disgust.

“I need more power.”

“To do _what_? Conquer the moon?”

Sasuke stiffened. Very quietly, very deliberately, he told her, “To kill a certain man.”

The girl looked him over with a small, pensive frown on her face. The disgust slowly bled out of her face. “You know what I’ve heard?” She raised an eyebrow. “I’ve heard that Orochimaru uses everyone who works for him until he hasn’t got a use for them anymore, and throws them out with the trash.”

“Well, maybe I’m using him too,” Sasuke retorted. He took a step towards her. “Look, you had better make your decision soon,” he warned her. “We’re probably not gonna be here for much longer.” There was only so much time even Orochimaru could spend looking for scrolls in burned buildings.

She fell silent for a long moment, but then, she nodded slowly. “I’ll come with you,” The girl said tiredly. “Orochimaru’ll probably eat me alive,” she remarked, grimacing, “but at least it’ll be over quick.”

“If you can survive this, you can survive him,” Sasuke promised her. He wondered where the desire to reassure her had come from, but decided it didn’t matter. (He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.)

“Got it,” she muttered, getting to her feet. “I’ve just gotta watch out for snakes in the grass.”

They began to make their way out of the Academy, the red-haired girl keeping pace with Sasuke so that her shoulder occasionally bumped against his. “By the way,” she said suddenly, ghostly echoes trailing after her voice, “if we’re gonna be traveling together, we should at least know each other’s names. I’m Karin.”

“Uchiha Sasuke,” Sasuke replied shortly, his face tightening.

Karin’s eyes widened, but then they narrowed again as she winced, her lips parting uneasily. “Oh,” she murmured, turning her face from his and wrapping her arms tightly around herself.

It was pity. It had to be. His name was well-known, after all, and these days, not primarily because of his clan’s kekkei genkai or battle prowess. But for once, he didn’t mind it as much as he normally did. (When he thought about it, it might have been because she had eyes like his.)


End file.
